Border Storm Read Free Page B

London, he also made it plain that he thought he, Loder, would make a better deputy. If he laid eyes on the girl, he would surely tell Scrope that Hugh had seen her and tried to protect her. He would do that just to make trouble, and Hugh knew that Scrope would listen.
    He did not trust any of Scrope’s men. Most were mercenaries who, for a price, would do whatever Scrope told them to do. They cared little for folks on either side of the line. On the other hand, Hugh believed that his own men generally felt as he did about the attack, especially with regard to the burning of so many crops and cottages, and the terrorizing of women and children.
    The burned cat-and-clay cottages did not matter much, because their owners could rebuild them quickly—usually in a day. Stone towers were easily patched, and doubtless many people had managed to remove their belongings, just as those in the clearing had.
    As for cattle and other livestock, Hugh told himself sardonically that any loss would be a temporary annoyance at best, because the Liddesdale men would just steal others to replace them. Crops were a different matter, though, for without them people could starve, which was why Scrope was so bent on destroying them.
    Borderers on both sides of the line disapproved of burning crops and had since the beginning of the violence a century before. When the Earl of Hertford had served as a march warden, he had once had to hire Irishmen to burn the Scots’ standing corn. His English Borderers had refused to burn their neighbors’ crop.
    The size of Scrope’s army precluded such refusal, and Hugh’s men dared not disobey Scrope’s orders, in any case. They knew that many Grahams were already at risk, because Scrope suspected that members of the tribe had helped Buccleuch with the raid on Carlisle. He blamed them as fiercely as he blamed Buccleuch, and he was bent on punishing as many as he could catch and convict.
    Still, Hugh thought, it was one thing to order men to pursue someone who had just stolen one’s cattle, or to help carry out a righteous act of vengeance. But Grahams, like other clans with members on both sides of the line, disliked setting off in cold blood to harry folks who might be allied in marriage or otherwise to them or their kinsmen. Their way of life, after all, was much the same.
    Even Scrope’s mercenaries had displayed certain wariness upon entering Liddesdale. They had obeyed Scrope’s command, but Hugh knew that they hated and feared the area.
    Liddesdale fairly teemed with scoundrels, but the forests and bogs that protected their hideouts terrified most invaders. Even the mercenaries knew that any safe paths—if the reivers had not blocked them with tree trunks or the like—were imperceptible to untrained eyes. Added to the ever-present risk of ambush, therefore, invaders risked floundering, even drowning, in a stinking swamp.
    With these thoughts stirring his unease again, and reminding him again that one girl in a tree might mean many men in other trees, Hugh was glad to see Loder emerge from the third cottage, shake his head, and go to mount his horse. Watching him, hearing nothing more menacing than water still dripping from the leaves of the trees, Hugh wondered if the massive raid would accomplish anything positive.
    Many—Scrope’s men and Hugh’s as well—had commented quietly on Scrope’s weak justification for so great an invasion. The usual excuse for a warden’s raid was that he had goods to pursue. That was not so today.
    A warden could also pursue a man he wished to bring to justice, but that required him to declare a “hot trod,” and such a pursuit had to take place within six days of the offense. One could hardly argue that a military invasion taking place months after the offense fit that definition.
    However, Scrope had offered the third excuse, declaring that the activities of a particular surname—to wit, the heathenish Scotts—had become so obnoxious that they warranted